The foundations of a B2B community truly loooooved by its members

Number one. Okay. Welcome, everybody. I'm very excited to have you guys join. Penny Power. Thank you for joining and rewarding us with your time. Penny. Really looking forward to this conversation and also to have you in one of our last episodes. Good, Sia, good or good morning? I'm saying good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Chris Sprenger from Zapnito. Thank you. How you doing? How are you? Amazing. Amazing to have you guys on. So we're gonna leave the channel open for about two to three minutes to allow everyone else to join. So, yes, I just want to give you a brief outline. We're very excited. We've just launched this online community Stories last month and this is episode two. And then we're going to have about six episodes in the first series where we are aiming to have leading and really kind of leading entrepreneurs and innovative individuals that are running online communities and are doing something really nice and special. So it's very, very important to highlight that what we really want to share with the whole audience right now is that new ideas share how other individuals are navigating this fantastic world of online communities. How organizations have pivoted from being an event business now to media organizations and seeing how this is kind of coming along. Yes. So I'm going to open up with the session here and I'm going to kind of welcome Ruth Janit from Lead Dev. I've had the pleasure of working with Ruth and the team and knowing their business, getting to being able to get a little bit under the skin of the business and understand how they work, how they operate. And I have to say that I've always been very, very, very excited at the opportunity of learning more about them. I would have been very impressed with the way that they've run the business, their approach to the market, their approach to engaging their community, their audiences. And that's what I'm going to and aiming to highlight with you guys. And the idea here today is to have a very nice and open and candid conversation with Ruth to try to dissect what is it that makes a community to be loved by its members. I personally honestly believe that LeapDev, in my 1215 years experience working in this industry, is the first time that I've seen a. An audience that is showing so much love to the organization. And I think this is amazing. And I just really kind of very happy for those that have joined or those that are going to be looking at this after the session takes place to have the opportunity to do. To do this. So, Ruth, welcome.

Thank you.

Do you Wanna, I just would like to kind of allow you to introduce yourself and who are you? What do you do? And let's begin by telling us a story about Lead Step. How did you guys start?

Yeah, thank you. Well, thanks for having me and thanks for being so excited to speak to me. I'm honored. I'm Ruth. I'm the CEO of Lead Dev. We are a company, we're about seven years old and me and my co founder Dave started the business not as Lead Dev, as White October Events, actually. And at the time I was working in event operations and Dave was running a software development agency in Oxford and some of his web developers started some kind of grassroots community tech conferences. They were running them for love because they wanted a conference to exist in Oxford on that subject matter. And they went really well and they were selling out. And we saw an opportunity to run it as a professional operation and partly to get his developers back to their day jobs. So we started White October Events and we ran a number of different tech conferences over the years, different brands. Some of them were kind of the specific developer roles and some of them were on specific technologies. And over the years we developed the Lead Dev brand, which is specifically aimed at leaders in kind of senior software engineers who are leading teams. And over time we've just kind of funneled. And that's the, that's the one brand we focus on that. So that was the birth of Lead Dev.

And that's amazing. So, Ruth, so you've initiated initially Lead Dev and Wide October Events as an event business, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Pre pandemic, we were in events business.

Okay, that's very good and very exciting. And we're going to talk about like basically a little bit of those kind of pinpoints as to what made you guys evolve into what you guys are now and where you're heading. So I think an important thing, I just really wanted to highlight every guest that comes along to the sessions, to the online committee stories. There is something that I think really differentiates them from the rest of the crowd, or when I'm saying from the rest of the eventrepreneurs crowd, as I call them. I think Lead Dev is an organization or was an event business when we, when we kind of first met you was an event business that did not think like an event business, did not act as an event business. And I think that is super special because I was like, ah, okay, in those aspects, for the audience that's here listening, why not think and act like an event business predominantly in our sector we generally have events where companies run events, they invite the speakers and then generally we all know that eventual preneurs are providing a platform for speakers, a platform for everyone. And then most times they don't pay the speakers. Most times they want them to contribute to the blog, they want to contribute to the conference information, but they, they just allow them to contribute. One of the things that libdev does is that you guys pay all of your speakers as a matter of policy. You guys pay all of the people that write in your blog as a matter of policy. That's very uncommon. Not even in everyone's world, but wider. Tell us about a little bit more.

About that and I'll just go one back because I'm assuming that nobody here knows anything about lead dev. Pre pandemic. We ran conferences in Europe and in North America and they were very traditional conferences. London was our flagship that was kind of 1800 people, quite a traditional conference format, and then kind of similar sized or slightly smaller conferences in New York and Austin, in the US and Berlin. And I guess it kind of goes back to the fact that we started off as a grassroots conference business and content is at the center of everything we put on and our focus has always been on the audience and kind of the audience challenge and the problems that we're trying to solve for our audience. And our speakers come from our community and we just, we value their time. They're giving us their time, they're giving us their ip, I suppose, and we think it's worth paying them. And we also have a kind of founding principle which is this belief that in some small way we think that we can have a positive impact on inclusion and diversity in the tech industry, which some, some parts of the tech industry can be quite homogenous, quite kind of white, male, same kinds of people getting, getting all the jobs. And we feel like we have a platform so we can give people, we can give a platform to a kind of more diverse roster of speakers. And part of inclusion means that you need to pay people because not everybody can afford to not be paid to speak. Not everybody can afford their time for free. And not everybody works for a big company that is willing for them to give their time for free. So if we want a genuinely diverse group of people to be able to speak to us, we have to make that possible for them. So we need to pay for their travel and we need to pay for their time and we need to make the experience comfortable for them. We need to allow them to bring their kids and their family if they need to sort of. It's about kind of respect for our speakers and our community, and it's about inclusion.

I think, you know, like, Ruth, you hit it on the head. And that's kind of when I evaluate or when I observe companies out there, I'm always trying to dissect, okay, what is it that they're doing, right? What is it that they might need to improve? Well, that's kind of part of what our job is. But I think it's that word that you say, respect, Respect for your audience. And I think this is so important because you guys put your audience first, above and beyond anything else. Above and beyond sponsors. Right. And I think something that I.

Sorry, I said, don't tell the sponsors that.

No, but I think it's important because like, you know, in our previous session, we were talking about that with Influence Group, which is a company that was a traditional kind of one to one business. And they kind of decided to flip the priorities in thinking about their audience. And that meant some sponsors and some people had to go that were not aligned. And then that is shifting that alignment. So if an organization is aligned with our vision, with our mind, they will join us for the ride. Which I think is kind of pretty much what you guys have right now here. The other aspect, so you treat very well your speakers. So, by the way, not only paying for their time, but paying for their tickets, their hotel, their expenses. Right, Ruth? And even sometimes, am I right saying even if they want to bring their partner, they can do so. So it's amazing. So there is an aspect about generosity. Why do you think being, and this is, I guess, that generosity. How do you think that generosity is translated into how being generous is commercially beneficial for ligdev, for argument's sake.

I mean, it wasn't a cynical move. It was just a belief that that's the right thing to do and that is how you should treat people. And you know, the community is. It's a kind of whole synergy of different groups of people. It's the audience, it's the speakers, it's our team, it's the people who get involved in serving the food and making sure that the video production works. And so I suppose I have always believed that everybody who's involved should feel like a vip and it shouldn't just be about the sponsors feeling or the keynote feeling like they're very important. I feel like everybody should feel that way. So I suppose we treat the speakers in a certain way, but we also treat the attendees like that. So we think A lot about inclusion for the attendees and what the experience of attending a kind of 1800 person might feel like for them. So think about quiet rooms and how you can kind of how you can get the most out of a conference experience and the sort of environment you need to be in to learn. And yeah, I mean, I guess speakers speak very positively about us. A lot of the growth that we've had. In fact, you know what, all of the growth that we've had over the years has been word of mouth. So we have traditionally not done a huge amount of marketing, done barely any paid marketing ever. And we have grown kind of organically by people sharing word of mouth that they've had a good experience and they liked it. And so for some people, that's the speaker saying, hey, next time they're doing a call for proposals, you should definitely submit. They treat you really well. Or it will be people saying, I attended it, had a really great feeling. The content was really solid. I got a lot out of it. And that, that's how our community has grown over the years. So I suppose that's how we benefited from.

Exactly. Because I think, I think, I think, I think too, for me, while I have been kind of looking at various communities and online communities and companies, there's a, there's a, there's a common denominator. Organizations that have a very strong ethos and a very strong code of practice, which I would like you to talk us through. What you believe in that. But I, before, I like to also touch upon that element. So the, on the element that we were talking about, not thinking like an event business. So it's a mentality of abundance in every way. Right. So respecting your audience, respecting your audience means, yes, we're going to reward your time. We respect that. That means programs and quality of content is going to be of top quality because they're being paid for it, they're being rewarded for it. So therefore they have a need of putting something top notch. The second thing that I think is important, Ruth, is going to the extra level. And again, I'm just thinking about. Event businesses are normally thinking about how can we become more streamlined financially? How can we keep our costs down? You guys are thinking, okay, what is important for the audience? Do they need a quiet room? Yes. So then you provide a quiet room. You have prayer rooms in your, in your, in some of the, in some of your events. I've never seen that, like being so thoughtful about all these elements and, and cognizant that. And I guess it's probably around understanding your audience. You know, you're talking about lead developers. So you have certain groups within the community that are introverts or they're not like probably you need to make them feel safe. And then that's kind of what the event experience are not only about the content is about the experience. And I think that's amazing. And I also wanted to highlight. You touched upon the two things which I want to dissect further. Number one is that your speakers and your communities then say whenever you're doing a call for papers or when a call for speakers, let us know, we will look at it. Tell us a little bit more about the story about what happens when you do a call for speakers.

Yeah, we, you know, our first conference, we probably we programmed it all ourselves because you don't have the reach at that point. And then since then the way we program our conferences is maybe we have a few invited speakers when we kind of first announce the event and then the rest come from a call for papers or a call for proposals which we put out to the community. And the last couple of years that's just been an absolute onslaught, hundreds and hundreds of people, people applying to speak at our conferences, which has been amazing. And we put a lot of work into this actually because we really believe in kind of building the pipeline in terms of diversity. So what we really want is we want a really diverse and interesting pipeline of people wanting to speak at our events. So then we program the best talks based on merit. But we know we're going to end up with a diverse final roster of speakers. And so we've done, we did a lot of work at the beginning of kind of going out through different interest groups and saying will you promote our corporate proposals to your group? So you know, girls who code black, women in tech, these kind of groups and now about 50, 50 the people who submit talks will be self identifying as from some kind of underrepresented group. And that's, that's, that's really massive for us. That's really important for us. And it, and it's, it's what we set out to do. And it does mean now that we have just a real wealth of amazing talks that come through and they're genuinely diverse and it just makes our job a lot easier when it comes to programming.

And that's amazing again Ruth, because like when you do the call for you get receiving again as you said it hundreds, which is kind of very, very contrary to what traditional event organizer that where they have to go and send the Invites chase a pipeline, speaker dropouts and all that sort of stuff. Do you guys, it's just a kind of curious question, do you guys get much speaker dropouts?

We don't get much. We get the odd thing, you know, ill health or.

Which is kind of. Right.

Yeah, no, we don't, we don't really. I know we've got to this lovely point where people really, really want to speak at Leedev and it's so nice.

Amazing.

And the other thing we do is from the beginning we've always said it's part of our job to ensure that people who haven't had an opportunity to speak before have a platform. So we have always made a point of having new speakers and providing things like speaker coaching if they want it. So yes, of course we need to have big names and we need to have influential people because that's who people want to hear from. But we also, we have a platform and we need to give new voices part of that platform and not just give them a platform and then allow them to sink in front of 2000 people, but give them some support if they need it in preparing their talks and that kind of thing.

That's amazing. And I think just kind of to highlight the element. Now this is my strategic marketing business strategy mind is that. Of course. So you've got your speaker call for speakers, hundreds apply, some obviously not all of them can come through because there's a selection period. There's a very kind of rigorous selection period. But interesting, you say that there's still the platform and then you have like the wider lead dev platform, the content platform that you guys have, which means that they can either a potentially still be able to contribute with some thought leadership, some value added content through the blog posts or through the content that they decide to create. So that creates, let's say in final terms, that pipeline where you get audience, then you get kind of really thought leaders trying to write content that amplify the message that they're still being valued. Because yet you still pay every person that writes a blog post on your website, is that right?

Yeah. So this is actually something that we haven't even been doing for 12 months yet. So during the pandemic, like everybody watching, I'm sure we had to kind of pivot quite quickly because pre pandemic we were just an in person event company. That's how we made all of our revenue. And over the last, how long has it been? Like a year and a half now, isn't it? Or a year in August last year we launched leaddev.com and it was something actually that we'd always been intending to do and we hadn't done it yet. So that is somewhere for articles written by our community, accessible for free by our community on very similar topics. And again, it's just about finding out how we can help solve our community's challenges. And we know that our community are big readers and they're very good at kind of self serving. When they've got a problem and they need to solve it, they'll go out and do research. And so that's been really lovely and as you say, it's been a really nice to have the opportunity to give platform to all of the talks that don't make it onto a conference because you've got what, 24 talks or something over the course of a two day event and publish lots of articles every week.

It's amazing the amount of content that you guys are now publishing and getting out in the market. I wanted to ask you.

Yes, we do, we pay everybody who writes for us as well. And it's the same principle and they're giving us their ip, they're giving us their time and so we believe it's just correct to pay them totally.

And I think, and I think again, good for you, Ruth, because that's against the general trend, which is about, okay, you want my platform, contribute to my platform, that's fine, I have a platform. Just you just make sure you do a good job. You see what I'm saying? In all the publishing world, etc. I want to do like a little kind of important element aside from it, because I wanted to go into understanding what's your community, what are the kind of channels and what would you call your community and the channels in which you communicate, which I think is pretty cool, but I want to highlight the elements and values and practices and what is so your code of conduct because I think you guys are very, very specific and you honor your code of conduct to a high degree of level. Tell us a little bit about that and why do you think it's such an important part of running your business?

The code of conduct is a very specific thing that we have for each event, which is actually very common these days in the tech industry and I don't know how common it is in the wider industry. You have a code of conduct and everybody who attends the event, whether they be a speaker or a paid attendee in registering, agrees to adhere to a code of conduct. And the code of conduct is really about providing a safe space for everybody to enjoy the conference. It's about a kind of harassment free space and it really allows us to say very explicitly the kinds of behaviors that we won't accept at a conference. And ultimately we would ask somebody to leave a conference, although to be honest, it's never ever happened. But I think more than giving us the clout to do that if we needed to, what it says is it kind of sets out our stall as the kind of, the kind of conference we are and the kind of values we hold. And so it allows people who are coming to the conference to say, okay, I will be safe and respected here. And that, yeah, that's very important to us. And rightly, it's becoming increasingly expected. So there are a lot of speakers in the tech industry who won't speak at an event if there isn't a properly upheld code of conduct. And that's absolutely right. And people who've got influence, speakers should use that influence to hold event organisers to account. They should say, if I'm the only woman on the platform, then I won't speak at this event. You know, you need, you need to be inviting genuinely diverse groups of people to speak at your event. You need to have a code of conduct.

Amazing.

Big believer in that.

I think that codes of conduct and kind of a specific, clearly stated and publicized. Yeah. Mission and your values that an organization is adhered to, I think is making a big difference right now because diversity and inclusion is a big thing. And all these themes that like making sure that people feel safe, making sure that people feel included, making sure that people are of all backgrounds, countries, ethnicity, levels of income are welcome. And I think that is something that you guys are big on because while you guys make most of your money from delegate tickets, which again one of the key points, very contrary to what the event industry is all about. So it also involves that you want to make sure that when you invite free people to attend or when you have subsidized places, they are truly subsidized. Right.

Yeah, we have, for all of our in person conferences we have scholarship schemes and they're, they're subsidized places so that people who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend are able to attend the event. And we try to do things like buddy them up with people who have come to the conference before so that they've got somebody to show them around and introduce them to people. And now that we run kind of virtual events and digital series and we're also extending that to those as well. So we do Digital scholarships.

Yeah. And then I think that's kind of an amazing thing in itself that. So scholarships are really truly scholarships. It's not that like, we need to satisfy sponsor, because, yes, most of your revenue comes as a result of delicate places which people happily pay people happily. And they want to attend to the point. To the point that your events, when we were physical, used to sell out. Tell us a little bit more about your event selling out. And was that on purpose? Did you. On purpose. Kind of underestimated it. Right, let's dissect that a little bit.

I never used to. It was only a few years ago that I realized that other event companies didn't work how we worked. And I guess what was different about US was about 75% of our revenue at that time came from ticket sales. And it is a bit different now because we do have quite a different business coming out the other side of the pandemic. I'm lost. What are we talking about?

No, we would. No, we were talking about the fact that, like, most of your revenue kind of comes from tickets.

Oh, yes.

Towards the end, a lot of your last three events before the pandemic hit were sold out.

Yeah. So we've never done that thing of giving away tickets to boost the numbers up for sponsors. We've just never done it. I don't know. We haven't had to do it. We've been really lucky. It didn't occur to us. And we. We haven't deliberately sold out in the sense that. You mean we haven't capped numbers in order to look like we're selling out because we wanted to sell more tickets. So we have tried to correctly estimate the size of space that we would need every year. And pre pandemic, we were just getting to the point of saying, do we need to cap for experience? Is there a point in the numbers after which people won't have as good an experience? Cap.